Posts Tagged ‘Survivor’

“It’s not little league where every kid gets to play X amount of innings.” – Tyrone

Alright, it’s episode 3, and we’re now starting to figure out who some of the more obnoxious players are this time around. First and foremost is Naonka, who spent most of her time last week expressing her distaste for “Fabio” and in general just being unpleasant to some people without having really been given a good reason to. In general, I like to avoid being openly rude to people unless they’ve personally wronged me, but apparently having dumb hair is enough to send Naonka off on a tirade. This week, on top on continuing her interviews in which she spews venom for the people she doesn’t like on her tribe, she takes it one step further by getting in a small physical altercation. Specifically, pretty much wrestling someone to the ground over fishing out a note to the hidden immunity idol hidden in a fruit basket that was won during the challenge. Oh yeah, and the person she wrestled only has one leg.

There’s a lot of different ways to think about this. The fact of the matter is that Kelly B (the owner of only one leg) is in fact a pretty stellar athlete and is probably somewhat capable of handling herself when someone is wrestling her to the ground. It is also a fact that this is a game for a million dollars, and you need to do pretty much anything you can to give yourself an advantage in the game, or at the very least deny your opponents any advantage they can find, even if they only have one leg. I’m sure I would normally find the incident relatively meaningless if it was anyone else who had wrestled Kelly to the ground. In this case, however, since it’s the most obnoxious and hateful of the contestants that got involved, it’s really easy to say “wow, that Naonka sure is a bitch.” Which she totally is. Honestly, I can understand when you’re spending so much time with a small group of people how one might be inclined to just not like certain people, but as far as we’ve been shown, Naonka has no good reason for having such hatred for these people, and yet spends so much of her confessional time disparaging them. Sadly, because she’s currently in the majority alliance on her tribe, she’ll be around for a bit longer. Hopefully her poor attitude will start to spill out on to people in her alliance, causing the tribe to vote her off (of course, the younger tribe will have to lose a challenge for that to happen, which might not happen for a while).

Meanwhile, the older tribe begins to have issues with some obnoxious people of their own. Thankfully, no one is nearly as bad as Naonka on the older tribe. Still, Jimmy T is definitely starting to grate with his insistence on being seen as an authority figure. That dude is seriously rocking some superiority complex, first complaining that no one is listening to his great ideas around camp, and then whining that he’s being wasted during the challenges by not being allowed a chance to perform a task. I’m sure the guy is a good leader and athlete, but dude needs to dial it down a notch. On the other hand, though I started out liking him, Marty’s ego is starting to get the better of him. He hasn’t gone into full-on douche mode quite yet, but I can see it slowly emerging. His motivation for wanting to vote out the current de facto leader of the tribe, Jimmy Johnson, was to both take out a viable threat and to install himself as the leader of the tribe. Sure enough, he got his way and Jimmy Johnson was voted out of the game. Next week, there’s almost certainly going to be a showdown of egos as Jimmy T and Marty attempt to assert themselves as the leader of the tribe. That won’t go well.

Who I’m rooting for: I still like Brenda, and I’m going to add Kelly B, if for no other reason that I want to see that bitch Naonka go down.

Who will win: Tough call, as the people who are thinking strategically about the game are also putting giant targets on their back. At this point, since I think Marty is going to be voted off somewhere down the line due to emerging as too strong of a leader, I’m going to go back to my original quasi-random guess of Yve. She seems to be liked by a lot of people on her tribe, which could go a long way during the later stages of the game.

Well, that certainly was a lot of crazy we were just exposed to. Holly on the Espada tribe gets worked up over some overheard comments and decides to essentially ruin an expensive pair of shoes by filling them with sand and throwing them in the ocean. Then, feeling the stinging pains of guilt, she decides to call a tribe meeting to confess her crimes and manages to come off looking like a complete lunatic. Yikes. Meanwhile, the La Flor tribe get beaten at the immunity challenge and are sent to tribal council, where Shannon proceed to completely go off to everyone about everything, calling Chase unloyal, Brenda untrustworthy, and for some reason, Sash gay. At the same time, Naonka spends the entire episode being self-centered and judgmental after thinking someone stole her socks and decides for some reason that she just doesn’t like Fabio (Jud…ugh, I hate that they officially made his name Fabio) and takes that attitude all the way to tribal, mouthing off the entire time. Jesus. Usually it takes a few weeks to get to this point of openly yelling at each other during tribal council, or even outside of tribal council for that matter. The first few episodes are supposed to be just about getting rid of the weak tribemates who can’t contribute to challenges well enough. And yet, here we are on episode 2 and we’ve already got people running their mouths off at tribal council. Shannon especially dug himself into an even deeper hole with his ranting and raving about loyalty and trustworthiness and basically taking an accusatory stance the entire time. It’s not quite clear what the voting spread was to be going into tribal council, but I would not be surprised if some people changed their minds right then and there about who they were going to vote off. Looks like there’s going to be quite a bit of drama on La Flor in the upcoming weeks.

I guess more stuff happened in the episode. Some scattered thoughts:

-I was appreciative that Naonka at least admitted that she was dead wrong about Kelly B and her prosthetic leg.
-Pretty surprised that Brenda was identified as a threat this early on and was on the chopping block. I’m glad that it shows the youngun’s are thinking long and hard about the game, but I hope she sticks around for at least a little longer. She’s entertaining and good eye candy.
-Nice job finding the immunity idol, Marty, but dammit Jill, don’t just give someone else the answer to the clue and then walk away expecting them to find it and share it with you. You want to be in control of the thing, not leave it up to someone else!

Who I’m rooting for: I still like Marty. He’s got that car salesman look in his eyes, but he seems pretty intelligent. I’m also going to add Brenda to my rooting list, for reasons listed above.

Who will win: Brenda’s already been identified as a thread, so I doubt she’ll make it all the way to the end. At this point, I’m going to say Marty. He’s shown himself to have some smarts, identifying the wisdom of letting Jimmy Johnson take the leadership role and not being seen as a target. Plus, he has the idol. I still get good vibes from Yve, but until she says more, I’m going to have to hold off on predicting her as the winner.